Drawing Club - Beginning
On Saturday 14th June 2025, I held the second art workshop I've ever done and the first in my Grey Lynn studio. It was full. Everyone had a good time. So I'm going to keep doing it.
Drawing Club will evolve but at the moment it's a two hour session at a long table with seven other people. We draw. Sometimes we use crayons. Sometimes it's 4B pencil. Sometimes it's ink - and yes, you can draw with a brush. We hang out together before work starts, making name tags, drinking coffee, eating biscuits and choosing a chair. Then we sit down at 10am and I drop us right in.
Drawing Club is something that's been on my mind for at least a year. In fact the seed was planted a long time ago. In 2000, I was working as a Geography teacher and took an afterschool class with the HOD of Art at my school. It had been seven years since I'd drawn anything or made any art. We did linocuts and I remembered how much I loved being in the art room, realised how much I missed art-making. A little part of me wished my own art studies at school had gone differently and that I'd put an "Fine" in my Bachelor of Arts. But no regrets - seriously - I am glad I came back to art-making as an adult, establishing a committed practice in my late 30s.
However old you were when you stopped, it doesn't matter. How old you are once you start back up doesn't matter either.
Beginning is the point - and that's part of what Drawing Club is created to do.
As well as arising out of my own longing to draw more, one of the inspirations for Drawing Club is a book by American artist and teacher Cat Bennett: The Drawing Club of Improbable Dreams. I own all of Cat's books and love them dearly for their softness and structure. I would love to go to a class with her one day.
Another reason I'm finally doing this DC thing is San Francisco-based artist and educator Wendy MacNaughton. I did Wendy's 30 Day Drawing Challenge in January and basically didn't stop. It became the foundation of my 2025 100 Day Project #artschoolplayschool on Instagram...and here we are.
My intentions for Drawing Club are a few-fold. I want to help people start drawing. I want to create a safe yet challenging place to begin again if you're a lapsed/blocked artist. I want to give people an opportunity to try something new, different. Everything we do will come out of someone's art studio practice (initially mine). That doesn't mean it will be conventional - it might feel weird, actually. And people are often surprised by how challenging it can be to do apparently simple things like gaze silently at a subject for five minutes or draw without looking down at their paper.
My studio is huge and seems perfectly suited to connection: my portrait photography business thrives in there and it's lovely to share the space with others. I want to provide an environment where people who have their own creative thing going on can come and be led for once: I will tell you what to do, you just turn up.
Drawing is personal and expressive yet it requires your attention, so class is the perfect place to put your phone away and focus on the here and now. Sometimes it's meditative. It's also a way to see the truth in that line you may have heard: How you do anything is how you do everything. Habits of control, distractibility, impatience, or self-criticism are just some of the things that show up while we draw and when we look at what we've made.
"How you do anything is how you do everything." [Source: unknown]
Given the state of things at the moment - rife with disconnection, prejudice, head-spinning change and fear - I wish for Drawing Club to be a place where you learn you can encounter new things and survive, where you become less guarded and more open-minded, where you reclaim your curiosity and reemember how to look with interest at your surroundings and your creations, whether you like them or not.
You are safe at Drawing Club but that doesn't mean you'll be comfortable all the time. Drawing builds resilience. It can strengthen empathy. Drawing is good for your brain - I'll share more on the science regarding attention, stress, and creativity in a later blog. As with anything, the more we practice drawing from life, the better we get - if "better" means we can capture the way things are, rather than how we think they are. With time, we feel confident to attempt drawing what we see in our mind's eye, just like we used to when we were young. The more we draw and learn to handle our dissatisfaction, the stronger and more interesting our relationship with ourselves becomes. We build trust.
I believe drawing to be truly therapeutic but not in the sense that we engage with our past experiences and personal struggles by turning them in to pictures. In my experience, drawing in a simple way - from life, from imagination, even doodling - can be soothing, engaging, purposeful. Drawing can be an end in itself.
Sometimes when we draw we experience a sense of freedom, a sense of being true. We may accomplish something important to us. We may come to know more about the world by understanding it in our own way. We develop our own language and, once we have made a bunch of work and then looked closely at it, we can recognise our personal "way of doing it". We can befriend our style - that self, that mind, that body - the one who draws that way.
I'd love you to come and experience that self, with others.
Tap here to see if there's a class running. Tap here to join the classroom mailing list.
xAB
